


A Dish Served Ice Cold

by spycandy



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Gen, Louis XIII's canon loyalty kink, Loyalty, Minor Injuries, Multi, Revenge, figure skating AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spycandy/pseuds/spycandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The national squad coach comes to visit the rink, bringing with him a woman everyone thought had been banned from skating forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the anonymous prompter who asked: "I want coach Richelieu looking extremely annoyed in the kiss and cry-area while Louis and Anne break down after a weak program. And former champion Athos trying to coach bright young skater D'Artagnan (or pair D'Artagnan/Constance)towards sucess, while his vengeful ex-partner Milady does her best to wreak havoc. And Porthos and Aramis quarreling about who gets the coolest costume.
> 
> "Or, you know, anything else. As long as they're figure skaters."

“Listen up you two,” says Athos as Constance and d’Artagnan run through their daily off ice warm up. “The national squad coach is supposed to be coming in this morning to check on the progress of our incredible ice king and queen, so I want you out there looking impressive. No messing about, no slacking.”

The duo nod with appropriate seriousness, in as much as they can do so given the uncomfortable halfway upside down stretches they’re both holding. The truth is, Athos has rarely coached anyone less given to slacking or messing about on ice than these two. 

Oh they get up to all kinds of mischief off the ice - he’s chaperoned them at enough junior competitions over the past two years to be well aware of that - but he couldn’t ask for more dedicated students. Truth be told, at times they’ve been the only reason for him to get up in the mornings at all, let alone to be in an ice cold building at the crack of dawn.

It’s make or break time for them now though, as this is the year that they step up to senior competition and find out whether their extraordinary potential can be be converted into something substantial. It won’t be easy, not least because it means that for the first time they’ll be direct competition against Anne and Louis.

The older pair have ruled the rink for almost a decade now. They have been national champions twice and represented their country internationally - but they’ve never made that coveted Olympic squad place and time is running out for them.

“Right, I’m going to get a coffee. You two finish up here and get your skates on.”

Athos leaves them in the shabby dance studio, which doubles as the rink’s birthday party room on weekends and is thus almost always decked out with novelty pirate or princess bunting, with a squashed cupcake hidden among the yoga mats. The coffee shop doesn’t open until public skating time, so his only option is plain black machine instant, but it contains caffeine and that’s all he’s looking for.

There are four skaters already out on the ice - Anne and Louis, of course, and Porthos and Aramis. The two men are old friends of Athos, the trio trained together under Treville for years, a training partnership that survived fierce rivalry and only pushed them all on to do better until Athos quit competitive skating thanks to a badly-timed combination of a broken ankle and a broken heart.

Aramis appears to be trying to launch his double Axel out of an outside spread. It isn’t going well. “Transitions?” asks Athos, leaning against the boards next to Treville and handing a terrible coffee to his former mentor. Treville shakes his head. “A couple of people picked up plus threes using that entrance recently, it’s worth a try if he can get it.”

“He’ll get it,” says Athos with confidence. “It’s just the kind of showy move he likes so he’ll work on it until he’s got it.”

“Did you hear Richelieu’s coming in later?” asks Treville. They both glance over to Anne and Louis, but the pair aren’t even practising right now, they’re stroking around the rink arguing fervently. The two coaches wince but it isn’t their place to step in. 

Apart from the national squad coach, the pair currently lack a guiding hand, not least because too many coaches have been burned by trying to deal with Louis’ impossible, terrifying mother. As Athos understands it, mother and son are now somewhat estranged, but he has no interest in taking them on - he’ll stick with his promising newcomers, thank you very much.

And indeed, here they come, boots on and ready to go. They don’t need telling how to whizz around the ice, getting the feel of it under their blades, so he leaves them to it, planning out the rest of the morning so as to show them off to best advantage.

***

“This _isn’t_ working,” says Louis, plonking her back on the ice without ceremony or grace. “It’s an ugly, stupid lift and it doesn’t fit the choreography at all.”

What he means, thinks Anne, is that it’s a whole lot of hard work for a move in which all of the audience’s attention will be on her rather than him. Their whole programme is a mess though. They’ve tinkered with the choreographer’s original vision too much.

“This isn’t the time Louis,” she says. “We can take the whole thing apart tomorrow, but for now let’s just show Richelieu we can do a level four lift. That’s what he wants to see.”

Louis snorts, but returns to the starting position. They’ve been skating together since their early teens, so by now she has some idea of how to cope with his stroppy fits of petulance, his sulks. There’s a good heart underneath it, for all that he was raised to be a ruthless ego-maniac. She’s seen how kind he is to the younger skaters at the rink.

But right now she is fed up with him, on the ice and off. Maybe it’s just their lack of success in recent competitions or maybe their partnership fundamentally isn’t working anymore. It’s never been a romantic relationship - they’ve not actually discussed it but she’s 99 percent sure Louis is gay, or would be if he took his mind off skating for long enough to notice people at all. 

Once it was all that mattered to her too, her whole world. Now though, she’s starting to think romance might be nice. A relationship, a future, a family.

“Anne!” Louis is waiting for her with his hand out and it takes her a moment to recollect how the lift entry works. Then she gives him a confident smile, grabs his hand and gives it a reassuring squeeze. They can make this work.

It’s going well until he flips her over into the second overhead position and she grabs her blade for the catch-foot hold. It’s something she does dozens of times a day, but this time the momentum is off and she jabs the heel of her skate right into the palm of her hand. She shrieks.

Louis, to give him credit, immediately grabs her into a safe carry hold and skates to the exit gate with her clutched to his chest.

“Don’t look,” she warns as he deposits her on one of the blue plastic flip down chairs, but it’s too late, he sees the blood dribbling down her arm and turns white.

“Oh,” he says. He swallows and looks wobbly and uncertain, which is an improvement on the time he fainted on ice when another skater sliced their leg open mid-spin.

“Sit yourself down Louis,” says Treville, as he runs up to see what’s happened. “How deep is the cut Anne?”

She lifts her other hand away, now also slick with blood. It’s deep and painful and probably going to need stitching. They won’t be doing any lasso lifts with that hand for weeks.

“Aramis!” Treville calls for his student and the skater sprints over and hockey-stops right by the gate. “Can you take Anne to the first aid room and get this cleaned up?”

“Gladly,” says Aramis and gives her a warm, reassuring smile before kneeling at her feet to slip some skate guards onto her blades. They aren’t even hers. “Come on.”

Just as she moves to get up, there’s a bang from the doors at the other end of the rink and Richelieu enters, followed a dark-haired woman who looks kind of familiar. She sees Aramis and Treville exchange an alarmed glance.

“What the hell is going on here?” shouts Richelieu, voice echoing around the cavernous space.

***

They finish their side by side spins in what feels to Constance like perfect unison, but she nevertheless glances around to check whether Athos approves. He isn’t there.

As she searches the perimeter of the rink with her eyes, she spots that the small group over by the gate has been joined by two outsiders. One is the recognisable figure of the national squad coach - she can see his furious glower from across the ice - and the other is someone unexpected.

“Isn’t that Milady?” she hisses to d’Artagnan.

“Bloody hell,” says her partner. “I thought she was banned from the sport. Like forever.” 

“What’s she doing with Richelieu? What’s she even doing in an ice rink,” growls Porthos, joining them. He frowns. “Where’s Athos gone?”

“He disappeared while we were spinning,” says Constance. “He must have seen her.”

They all know the horror story of course, at least some of it. It isn’t as if Athos will ever talk about it, but the skating world is small enough that everyone knows everyone else’s business - and anyway the scandal made the national news.

Anne de Winter, nicknamed Milady, had been one of the country’s top ladies skaters until she was banned after sabotaging a rival by tampering with her skates. The blade had sheered apart as Tommi de la Fere went for her Lutz take-off and after smashing into the boards she had been lucky to escape with a concussion.

What made the whole story so deliciously fascinating to the media was that Tommi was not only Milady’s rival, but also her sister-in-law, since Milady was married to Tommi’s older brother and the then national men’s champion Athos de la Fere.

Matters only got worse as, after the investigators announced their findings, Athos had gone on a lengthy drinking spree all alone and woke the next morning in hospital, with his ankle in plaster. They weren’t sure whether even Athos knew what had happened that night, but he hadn’t told anyone and the papers certainly never found out.

“What should we do?” asks Constance.

“Keep practising,” says Porthos. “I’ll go and find him.”

Porthos leaves and that means they now have the rink all to themselves. Even so they hesitate. Constance can see written on d’Artagnan’s face that he’s just as worried for their coach as she is. Athos never exactly lets on how hard a time he’s had coping with the fall out from the scandal, his subsequent divorce and the painful physio for his shattered ankle in the past couple of years, but they do know they only rarely see him smile.

“Come on,” says d’Artagnan at last. “He wanted us to show off the throws first and it isn’t like Richelieu has anyone else to watch now.”

They power around the rink doing backcrossovers hand-in-hand to build up speed for the throw triple Salchow and, as usual, holding onto d’Artagnan makes everything feel right.


	2. Chapter 2

The rink has been their second home since they were small boys, which means Porthos knows every potential hiding place in the building. As a result, it takes him less than five minutes to find Athos, who is slumped behind the evil penguins so that only the top of his head is visible.

“If you stay in there too long, they’ll rent you out for wobbly toddlers to hold on to,” says Porthos. It elicits only a “Hmpf” from the back of the penguin enclosure.

He hops up to sit on the skate hire counter, giving him a better view of his friend, and is shocked by what he sees.

“Christ Athos, it’s not even eight a.m. yet.”

Athos shrugs and takes a large swig from the bottle he’s holding. It looks like one of the vodka bottles that are regularly confiscated by the ice marshalls from teenagers on the weekend disco sessions.

Alarmed, Porthos drops down amid the penguins and makes his way to Athos’s side. It’s lucky that he found him so quickly, the bottle is still three-quarters full, but it won’t stay that way for long if Athos gulps it down at this rate.

“For pity’s sake, put that away. If Richelieu sees you like this, he’ll have your coaching licence removed.”

“It’s not going to matter if he does,” says Athos, but he allows Porthos to pry the bottle from his fingers anyway. “She’s going to take them away from me. I should have known it was only a matter of time before she took her revenge.”

“Her revenge?” asks Porthos. “I don’t understand. She was the one who hurt Tommi.”

Athos looks away from him and glares at his own feet. There’s a long moment of silence, but Porthos can wait. He shuffles up so that they’re sitting with their shoulders pressed together, a silent offer of support.

“Yeah, she was,” says Athos eventually. “And she’d have got clean away with it if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who took the evidence of her sabotage to the investigators. They were about to conclude it was a freak accident otherwise.”

“Fuck,” says Porthos. “I never knew that.”

“What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to believe it but… She tried to get me to keep it secret.” Athos shudders, drops his head onto his knees. “Tommi was still in hospital, they were saying the head injuries might be life-altering… I ruined her career. I smashed _us_ to pieces.”

“You did the right thing,” says Porthos. He doesn’t doubt this. What Milady did was wicked and the fact that Tommi actually made a full recovery is irrelevant. She _could_ have been killed. And even if the only consequence had been lost points, what right did that woman have to drag Athos into cheating? 

“And she’ll never forgive me for that. She said she was going to take away everything that ever mattered to me. She already took skating, now she’s going to take coaching as well.”

“No,” says Porthos. “No way. Those kids owe you everything, they won’t go off with someone with her reputation.”

“If she’s got Richelieu on-side, she can make impossible for them not to. They need funding and federation support. And… and they’ll be better off without me.”

Porthos can’t believe he’s hearing this. It sounds like Athos is giving them up without even putting up a fight. But to be honest there’s something worrying him far more than D’Artagnan and Constance’s skating future, because he has a niggling feeling he hasn’t been paying nearly enough attention for quite some time.

He holds up the twice-confiscated vodka bottle. “Athos. Just how much _have_ you been drinking lately?”

Athos shrugs. “My working day ends at noon most days.”

That both isn’t an answer and is an entirely horrifying one. How? How have they missed this? They used to be the rink’s three inseparables. “Shit.”

“It helps with the pain. And the… everything else.”

“I thought your ankle was better,” says Porthos, because he has no idea what to say about the rest.

And that, finally, is what gets a spark of actual anger rather than resigned misery from Athos. “If my fucking ankle was better don’t you think I’d be out on the ice rather than coaching from the boards?”

***

“Give me the first two minutes of your free programme,” says Richelieu. “We might as well watch something having travelled all this way.”

D’Artagnan’s mind is a whirl as they skate to centre ice. It’s vital to impress Richelieu, and through him the federation, if they’re going to progress as much as they need to this year. However good their performance is at club opens or nationals, they depend on the governing body for the funding to send them to international events. But there’s something off about this whole situation.

“I don’t trust them,” says Constance, as they strike their starting pose. “Not for a minute. That Milady is up to something.”

“She hasn’t said anything at all,” points out d’Artagnan. The music starts and they skate apart for their opening side-by-side spins, so they can’t communicate for a while.

They come back together for the throw split twist, his hands snug on her waist. “It’s still highly suspicious,” she mutters in his ear.

“I agree,” he says as he catches her and places her neatly back on her blade for a moment, before they switch the handhold and he lifts her into a rotating overhead lift. The music stops abruptly. “We stick together whatever, right,” he adds as they glide to a halt.

“Of course.”

“Come over!” shouts Richelieu and they obey, still holding hands as they stroke back to the boards.

“You’re very competent,” he says. Ouch, that’s damning with faint praise indeed.

“But it’s so pedestrian,” adds Milady. “You could do _so_ much more.”

They’ve barely been working on this programme for a month, d’Artagnan wants to protest. It’s on the tip of his tongue to protest that they _will_ do more with it by the time competition comes around, but Richelieu is already talking again.

“I have my doubts, but there’s enough potential that we’d be prepared to make you an offer,” he says. “You come and train with us full time and we can send you to every ISU event you want to do next year. We’ve got much better facilities than here. And we have a whole team of excellent coaching staff rather than one washed up…”

“You should take it.” Athos’s slight limp is more evident when he’s walking with purpose and he strides towards them now, Porthos hard on his heels, with a look d’Artagnan finds hard to interpret. “What they’re offering is an incredible opportunity.”

D’Artagnan and Constance shake their heads in perfect unison and a shared glance is all that’s required to be sure they are on the same page with this, whatever the cost. It isn’t even flattering to be asked really, not when it’s such a transparent ploy to hurt their coach.

“Athos no. We’re staying right here. We’ve decided. We need a coach we trust,” says d’Artagnan.

“You should listen to your coach,” says Milady and d’Artagnan doesn’t like the cold pleasure she evidently takes in saying this one little bit. “Or you can end your careers right here. There won’t be any other funding - not for travel, certainly not for training.”

So that’s it then, thinks d’Artagnan. He’s heard people say federation politics cost them their big chance and thought it was sour grapes. They’ve come a long, long way in this sport, but he won’t betray Athos just get to get a step further up the ladder and he loves that he doesn’t have a moment’s doubt that Constance feels the same. 

“Nonsense.” Louis has been sitting in the midst of this with his head down as if still feeling queasy, pale and silent until now. “They don’t need your funding.”

“Oh but they do,” says Richelieu. “They don’t have your resources.”

It’s easy to forget most of the time, despite the beautiful vintage Porsche in the car park and the top end training gear, that Louis comes from money. Old money and really quite staggering amounts of it. He could be out partying with the younger royals, if it weren’t for his dedication to a life of early morning training.

“Ah, well that’s the thing. They do now - if they want them of course, and if Athos approves. I’d rather like to invest in Team Constagnan.”

“But they’re your rivals,” splutters Richelieu, he seems a lot less menacing with the wind suddenly taken out of his sails.

“What can I say? I find their loyalty inspiring.”

D’Artagnan looks at Constance and then at Athos and he thinks both their eyes look suspiciously shiny. His own throat has tightened such that he doesn’t trust his voice for a moment, so he’s relieved when Constance answers for all of them.

“Oh Louis! Thank you!” She throws her arms around their new backer.

D’Artagnan turns to Richelieu and Milady. “Well, thanks but no thanks then,” he says, as airily as he can manage. “We’ll see you at Nationals no doubt. Not you though, I don’t think you’re allowed in.”

As the pair leave, Louis turns to Athos who still hasn’t spoken. “It is all right isn’t it? I mean the money comes with no strings attached of course, but if you’ve room for a choreography consultant I’d like to… well if Anne and I are retiring after this season… I mean…”

“Absolutely,” says Athos, sounding somewhat gruff and gripping Louis’s shoulder. “On one condition - we are not calling them Team Constagnan ever again.”

“Oh I don’t know, it has a certain charm,” says Porthos.

D’Artagnan is about to add his objections to the name when he spots Aramis and Anne making their way back down the stairs from the first aid room. “What’d we miss?” calls out Aramis. “What’s been going on down here?”

It’s obvious that there’s been more than first aid going on upstairs. Anne’s hand _is_ now bandaged, but there are several telling bloody red-brown hand prints on Aramis’s pale green ‘ _If figure skating was easy, they’d call it hockey_ ’ t-shirt. And both of them look a lot more flushed and frankly kiss-mussed than they did earlier. Oh, and also Anne’s uninjured hand is holding onto Aramis’s.

“Long story short, Louis thwarted Richelieu and Milady’s evil plan,” says d’Artagnan. He thinks that’s a fair summary.

“That’s good. I need to take Anne to the medical centre to check if this needs stitching. Can I borrow your car Athos? We’d take my bike, but it won’t be safe if she can’t hold on.”

“Yeah.” It’s Porthos who answers rather than Athos. “I’ll take Athos home, he shouldn’t be driving anyway.”

That puzzles d’Artagnan, although he can see that his coach still looks shaken by the encounter with his ex. Still, if there’s something more to it, Porthos seems to have it in hand.

“Look at all this lovely ice going to waste,” says Treville, addressing the entire huddle of skaters clustered around the gate. “Everyone not injured get out there and do some cool down work. Or nobody will be going to any championships at this rate.”


	3. Chapter 3

Six months later...

 

“There’s a lot of leather in these costumes Aramis, are you sure they’re going to work?” asks Porthos, studying the sketches spread out across the biggest table in the rink cafe.

“They’ll be fine - look the sleeves are separate pieces so you get enough arm movement.”

“I haven’t worn knee high boot covers like those since that _Pirates of the Caribbean_ programme in, what, 2008?”

“It’s a novelty gala routine Porthos. It’s supposed to be a bit ridiculous. What do you think Athos?”

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves with costumes for this before I’ve even…” Athos pats the large square cardboard box that’s propped against his chair legs. “Let’s see how today goes first.”

“Today’s going to be hell, even with squishy customs - new boots always are. And you’ve been off the ice for, what? Two and a half years and two surgeries.”

Athos knows Porthos is just trying to manage his expectations, but he’s nervous enough about this already.

“How’s Anne?” he asks to change the subject.

“Not throwing up anymore, which she’s very happy about,” says Aramis, with the world’s biggest smile, as ever when he talks about his girlfriend. “She has a tiny little bump now, it’s so cute.”

When Porthos had first insisted on these weekly get-togethers after Richelieu’s fateful visit to the rink, Athos was mortified by the idea that they were having to keep an eye on him. As it turned out, they’ve spent just as much time hand-holding Aramis through the shock of impending parenthood and talking Porthos down from essay-crises for the distance learning sports management course he had signed up for. But most weeks they just talk nonsense and enjoy being in each other’s company.

“What about you? Are you seeing that sociology lecturer again?”

“Women’s Studies and… maybe. She’s away at a conference but she did say she’d call when she gets back. I’m not sure. I’m taking everything a day at a time. Apart from preparing for Worlds obviously, there’s a whole wallchart of future planning for that. It has stickers.”

He still can’t quite believe how well things have gone in the past six months. Constance and d’Artagnan finished ten points clear of the field at Nationals and then, just to underline the point, they were on the podium at the Finlandia Trophy event. Even with Milady no doubt still lobbying behind the scenes, the federation was left with no choice but to announce them for the Worlds team.

Also, thanks to persistent nagging from Porthos, he had tracked down a specialist to look again at his ankle - who took one look at the x-rays and shuddered. The surgeries and recovery had been horrendous, but his friends had been there around the clock, managing his pain meds, marathoning terrible movies and generally stopping him from coping by getting blind drunk.

When he’d muttered something about being embarrassed to need such looking after, Constance had called him “idiot” and made him watch _Ice Princess_ as a punishment.

Now that he can walk without pain, Louis has insisted on getting him custom-made skates, with all the additional padding he could possibly need - which immediately prompted Aramis and Porthos to make plans to include him in their swashbuckling act for the club Christmas gala. He hopes he can do it, but he thinks he’ll be happy if he can just get out there and glide.

He puts down his empty coffee cup and takes a deep breath. “Right then,” he says. “Let’s do this thing.”

**Author's Note:**

> The skating federation in this story is in NO WAY meant to depict the USFSA, the FFSG, NISA or any other real federation.


End file.
